I finally ended up seeing the movie Juno today. I guess it’s about time. I really liked it – maybe even loved it. I guess I ought to have, since I like those quirky indie movies with those non-conformist protagonists which I so much want to be like.

Clearly many people also liked it, given its hype, box office performance, and subsequent multiple Oscar nominations and one award. But I think the reasons why we love this movie so much expose how racist we are.

First of all, many people found the small town setting cute. I said to myself while watching it: this seems like a nice place to live. But why is this town and its high school so endearing? I’m not going to beat the master, allow me to channel this blog:

I was wading though the glossy recruiting brochures and perky human resources recruiters at the college job fair. You had a nicely done booth on the back wall with the name “SpaceX”. Your company does private space exploration. I had heard of your team’s successful launch of Falcon 1 to orbit and was very impressed. I watched the whole video with rapt attention a few weeks ago.

I stumble upon your booth, waiting for a turn to talk. I get one and introduce myself, going into the usual diatribe about my qualifications and why I’d be an amazing corporate drone. You look somewhat unimpressed and ask what I’m really interested in working on. You see through my vague large-corporation friendly answers.

No, you are not an HR shill, you’re actually an engineer, and I realize this too late. You’re a brunette in your late twenties or perhaps thirties, and are pretty, but are smarter than pretty, which makes you even prettier. I wax on about how although I have experience doing software, I’m open to new things and have a solid understanding of electromagnetism.

Oh my god, who was that girl, he thought. He found the nearest stool in his bathroom. He was in a panic. She could have had anything. He thrust his hips forward over his bathroom sink and began scrubbing himself there vigorously with anti-bacterial. And how could he think to have done this without protection?

Knock-knock-knock. “You in there?”, his roommate stupidly asked.

“Yeah, give me a sec”, he replied. He sounded like he was about to cry.

A short story based on a dream I had this morning.

This was the farthest we as a species had ever gone. And now they were going to die here. Graham shook himself out of those thoughts. He couldn’t have ‘em, he was the mission commander, the commander. Alright “let’s do it”, he announced to his crew-mates in his best authoritative voice. The pilot and mission specialist went off, presumably to work on the situation.

Time was limited now, and they knew it. “Let’s go check in the systems room”, he said to Sarah, his flight engineer, in a much different voice. She was the one crew member he never felt like he was commander to. She was matronly, nearing the end of her flight career probably. She was still in terrific shape. In an earlier year… actually only a few years earlier, he might have described the body he was now ogling as ‘bangin’. The worries of many missions showed in the lines on her face.

Scala has a badass type inferencing system. Use it to save yourself time.

Ever have a situation where you’d like to use an underscore to declare an anonymous function, but have to use that underscored variable twice? That’s really annoying isn’t it?

For example, to map a list of Doubles to , you might be tempted to write:

A gotcha when working with somewhat mathematical code in Scala is the order of operations.

Copied here from the 2.7 version of the Scala specifications:

The precedence of an infix operator is determined by the operator’s first character. Characters are listed below in increasing order of precedence, with characters on the same line having the same precedence. ... Read the rest

Women are so fortunate in that they are… at least some of them are… simply born with beauty.

I guess men are a bit also, but not so much nearly. We’re not the fairer sex. We’re the ugly half, but we have the same or perhaps even a greater level of aesthetic taste. We desire for beauty as much, but don’t posses it ourselves. We have to create it ourselves.

So I just saw The Dark Knight and I can’t sleep with getting something off my chest. You probably don’t want to continue reading if you haven’t seen it, but then again, it’s a very mild spoiler.

The whole movie seems to be a critique of false idealism captured by Harvey Dent. Batman and Gordon are compromisers. They’re willing to bend the rules sometimes. Batman has his one-time-use super-spy system, Gordon fakes his own death. But Harvey is the white knight – until he fails and is turned a villain by the Joker. Rachel too, breaks her promise to Bruce. Although she does love him, she doesn’t have hope that she can lead a happy life with her childhood friend, ultimately deciding to marry Harvey.

The idealists don’t bend, but break, and the pragmatists endure to make the difficult and dirty choices.

This is a fan-fiction exploring the strained relationship between Serge and Leena after the events of Chrono Cross (a Square console RPG).

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“Serge…”